Glucose Fuel Cell Based On Anode Oxidation At Nano-structure Gold Material

Implantable biomedical electronic contribute to improve life quality and the health treatment.However,the development of implantable biomedical electronics deeply relies on a robust and reliable energy supply technology.Glucose is typical biomass contained in most living organism.Therefore,harvesting energy from glucose by using glucose fuel cells is a solution to generate electricity to power biomedical electronics.Meanwhile,glucose represents as a plentiful and clean energy source.Glucose fuel cell under alkaline or neutral condition is a promising technology to deliver power from glucose.However,high efficient anode catalyst for glucose oxidation is a key to fabricate a high performance glucose fuel cell.Herein,we have prepared two kinds of Au-base catalysts and used them as anodes,coupling with commercial Pt/C catalyst as cathode,to construct glucose fuel cells which can work in neutral and alkaline condition.Nanoporous gold wire electrode was deliberately designed and prepared with an electrochemical alloying/dealloying strategy.The nanoporous gold catalyst shows promising performance of high catalytic activity and good anti-oxygen ability in neutral and alkaline conditions.We discussed the mechanism of glucose oxidation at nanoporous gold and the anti-oxygen ability.Based on the ability of oxygen-tolerance,we designed a needle-like electrode which can inhibit the interference on Pt/C cathode and have nice catalytic ability.We tested the performance of glucose fuel cell based on the structure of cathode|membrane|anode.the maximum power density is 3.4μW cm^-2 in physiological solution containing 10 mM glucose.The maximum power density is 1.0μW cm^-2 and 1.5μW cm^-2 in blood and serum based on needle-like glucose fuel cell,respectively.We prepared two kinds of 3D flexible gold aerogel by the simple in-situ reduction method and freeze drying technology,respectively.The performances of gold aerogel A and gold aerogel B were examined with physical and electrochemical measurements.The results showed that the aerogel A possess higher catalytic actvity than aerogel B.Based on the results,we constructed a membrane-less glucose fuel cell,of which the open circuit voltage is 0.54V and the maximum power density is 15.1 mW cm^-2 in 0.1 M KOH solution containing 6 mM glucose.This cell still can maintain most of the output power even after one month.Overall,we have successfully prepared nano gold catalysts and used them to fabricate glucose fuel cell working in neutral and alkaline condition.We demonstrated that the constructed glucose fuels might be potentially power the implantable biomedical eecltronis or be used as a new bioenergy technology.